Nvidia Says No to Open Source Driver

"Nvidia supports Linux, as well as the Linux community and has long been praised for the quality of the Nvidia Linux driver. Nvidia's fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property Nvidia wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software," was the graphics card vendor's response to the kernel developers' petition against closed source drivers.

The kernel developers stated that closed source drivers harmed the Linux ecosystem. Nvidia disagrees, stating that it has its own kernel development team. Nvidia does not expect other kernel developers to help out with debugging Nvidia's kernel modules. On top of this, the kernel interface layer for the closed driver is structured to allow free access to the Linux specific code it contains.

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AMD has put its money where its mouth is, and published the first free Linux drivers for its ATI R500 and R600 graphics cards in collaboration with Novell. After a lengthy break, Nvidia has also released a new version of its proprietary graphics driver.

Andy Ritger, NVIDIA manager responsible for the Linux graphics cards, as announced on the X.org mailing list that the graphics chip company will no longer develop the open source 2D video drivers for its chips. He recommends using the VESA X driver instead.